He looked blankly at me.
I nodded across the road. A black Simca saloon was just parking across the way.
‘Your friend?’ I queried him.
‘No comprendo, signore,’ he said.
‘Save it,’ I said. ‘I shall be in here for a while, then you can give me a lift down to the Uaddan. Captain Asab won’t mind.’
He gave a shy little grin, then dry-washed his chin with one hand, and said, ‘The signore is talking in riddles.’ He ducked his head at me and moved on. I watched him go, thinking that Captain Asab must be very hard up for trained men. Either that, or he was putting a novice on to me for the experience, knowing that I wouldn’t mind.
In the Embassy hallway there was a porter in a serge suit and red fez who wanted me to fill out a memo in triplicate stating the nature of my business. Instead I wrote—Martin Freeman and William Dawson—on the back of one of my cards and handed it to him, saying, ‘Ask the Ambassador if he can spare five minutes.’
He looked shocked and disappeared. I sat down and watched a girl in a white blouse and check skirt arranging a bowl of flowers on a stand further down the hall. She arranged them nicely, showing a lot of leg, one of which had a ladder in its nylon. A telephone rang twice somewhere. An Air Force officer came down the stairway and the girl moved around in her arranging so that he could see the laddered nylon. She was wasting her time. He went by her and by me and out with a glazed look in his eye as though he had just been dismissed from the service.
Five minutes later I was in a little room on the first floor talking to a secretary who had been designated to deal with me in lieu of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. There was a silver-framed photograph of a woman and two nice boys on his desk, all of them smiling. His wife and children, I presumed. It was a pity he wasn’t smiling too. It spoilt the family atmosphere. He looked worried and cautious and he had the right face for it. It was clear too that he had no time for me. I was in the wrong profession and certainly wasn’t wearing the right tie. His was Old Marlburian; mine was a green number with red dots on it and the silk a little frayed on the knot. Wilkins that morning had found time to give it a disapproving stare. Anxiety and caution—to them in other people I am as sensitive as a sea anemone sensing the turn of the tide.
I said, ‘I just wanted to check with you whether you had had any instructions from my client about the disposal of her brother’s body? Captain Asab of the police here has told me that you have already informed her of the tragedy.’
‘No instructions have so far been received.’
‘Will you let me know when you do receive them? I’m at the Del Mehari Hotel up the road.’
‘Certainly.’ He raised his bottom two inches from his chair. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.
‘Dreadful thing,’ I said. ‘Shot through the head and then dumped in the drink. Not that he didn’t have something like that coming to him by all accounts. Still—de mortuis nil nisi bonum.’
The tag and its sentiment didn’t impress him beyond making him lower his bottom to the seat.
‘I think, Mr Carver, you can safely leave everything in our hands—in co-operation with the Libyan police, that is.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Would you have any idea which way the sea current sets along this coast at this time of the year? East to west or the other way round?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
He was beginning to lift again but I stalled him.
‘And what about this Bill Dawson he was last seen with?’
‘How did you know—’
He broke off, not because the telephone had begun to ring on his desk, but because for a moment he had assumed that I knew something I wasn’t presumed to know, and then had decided that I was probably making some kind of inspired guess. I was, of course. In fact, for inspired guessing I’m in the Olympic class. How otherwise would I make money and eat?
He picked up the phone and answered it. I sat there and listened. His eyes kept flickering towards me as he said ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’, and then once ‘Would you mind repeating that?’ It was a classical example of a guarded conversation and his eyes on me gave away the fact that whatever was being said to him he connected in some way with me.
He wrote something on a memo pad with a pencil, put the phone down, tore off the memo page and stood up.
‘Would you please excuse me a moment?’
I nodded graciously. Why not—he was on the Queen’s business. I was just on my own, but I had more than an inkling even then that the two were going to be mixed. He went out of the room, through a door behind his desk. As it closed I reached over and tore off the next page of the memo block. He had a good heavy hand with a pencil when he wrote. I didn’t bother then to try and decipher the markings that had come through to the lower leaf. When he came back the memo page was neatly folded in my pocket.
I said, ‘You were going to tell me something about this Bill Dawson who was with Freeman sometime shortly before his death.’ Stiffly, he said, ‘I wasn’t aware that I was. We know nothing of any Dawson who might have been connected with Mr Freeman.’ He rose smartly, no stalling him this time, but he put a patently false note of co-operation into his voice to get me eased out of the room.
